


Okay.

by quicksilverdeancas (quicksilvermalec)



Series: #QuarantinedPride2k20 [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - No Angels (Supernatural), Demiromantic Castiel, Domestic Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Married Castiel/Dean Winchester, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, but not the cool writing kind, enjoy??, the ptsd kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24640270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksilvermalec/pseuds/quicksilverdeancas
Summary: TW FOR CHILD ABUSE!! CASTIEL WAS ABUSED AS A KID!! Human!AU
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: #QuarantinedPride2k20 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1770427
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32





	Okay.

“I’m sorry, you’re _what_?”

The words are odd and distorted, like someone put sound through a funhouse mirror – is that even possible? Cas doesn’t know – but they don’t sound like the voice of the man he loves and he’s terrified, terrified of the way that hurts him, how it digs down into his skin and burrows into the deepest, most shameful parts of himself and activates things he never wanted to remember existed.

He’s not hearing Dean’s voice anymore; he hears his father, his older brother, his eighth-grade girlfriend, that boy who was his best friend for two years. He hears the voices of a thousand people over a thousand years it seems, all saying the same things.

“You can’t be that.”

“That doesn’t exist.”

“You’re confused.”

“You’re broken.”

_“You’re fucked up.”_

**_You’re a freak._ **

You don’t exist, Castiel Novak, and you never have.

His throat closes up, he stares at the floor.

Maybe he should back up.

His name is Castiel Novak. He is 41 years old. He is married to a man named Dean Winchester Novak. And he is demiromantic.

He has known this for many years. And his entire life he’s been harassed and even abused for it.

He’s stopped telling people. Because no one believes him when he tries. So he’s hidden this secret from his husband for exactly twenty years of marriage. He’s coming out today.

But backing up further.

He was always a studious child. He researched things for fun, learned all the facts he could fit into his young, impressionable, precocious brain. He searched for answers to the issue of why he didn’t experience ‘crushes’ like his friends did. He found the aromantic spectrum. He discovered the term ‘demiromantic’ and decided, this feels right. This fits.

And he tried to come out to his father. His father slapped him across the face.

That’s what his identity has always been associated with – pain.

He had a girlfriend who broke up with him on the spot when he tried to explain.

His best friend of several years never spoke to him again after the day he came out.

His older brother taunted him with it from the time that he was 10 until he left the house at 16 – an emancipated teen who needed to get away.

He married Dean at twenty-one, young and soft-eyed and easily tricked, but he trusted Dean like he’d never trusted another person in his life. Dean was kind, and gentle, and beautiful, and Dean had treated him like a real, honest, functional person. Dean had found him a therapist, had helped him work through his trauma. Dean had sat there when Cas woke up screaming at 2:30 even though Dean had to be up in an hour and a half. Dean had held him through the worst panic attacks he’d ever had. Dean had stroked his hair when he flashed back to his father. Dean had sat at his side when he vomited into the toilet at the thought of what was done to him as a child.

And now, because of this, Castiel is going to lose him.

He comes back to himself furiously, incredibly fast and abrupt, with a jolt that almost knocks him off his feet. And the world slowly resumes turning just the way it was before.

“I- I’m demiromantic,” Cas repeats in a hushed, choking tone of voice.

Dean looks confused. “Isn’t that, like, only being romantically attracted to someone after you’ve been friends for a long time?”

“Yeah,” Cas confesses.

“Then why did we start dating as early as we did?”

Cas swallows the lump in his throat. “I was attracted to you, just not… romantically. Yet,” he adds. “I was queerplatonically attracted to you, which means that I felt more for you than friendship, but not quite romance. There’s sort of an odd gray area in there for me that doesn’t exist for some other people, but for me it was there and it was like ‘I want something with him, I want to hold his hand and paint his nails and kiss him in a movie theater and bring him to my Christian family’s Thanksgiving dinner just to give them a grand fuck you’ but I as of then I couldn’t have honestly said ‘I want to marry him and have children and three dogs in a fourth-floor apartment in the Kansas suburbs’.”

He comes down from his rant, still staring at the floor and not his husband.

“Cas,” Dean whispers. “Do you love me?”

Cas nods slowly.

“Do you love me romantically?”

Cas nods again.

Warm arms envelop him and he nearly sobs. Even after twenty years with Dean, his touch starvation is still very prominent and sometimes he can’t bear to be touched at all without breaking down. But he needs it, he needs it so desperately. He leans into Dean’s solid, larger body, desperate for any comfort Dean wants to give him. And oh, does Dean give it. He gives Cas all the comfort he never knew he needed.

“Our relationship was not built on a lie,” is the first thing Dean whispers. “And we have never had a problem. You and I, Cas, we’re made to last. We fight, yeah, who doesn’t fight with their spouse? We’ve never even really been in danger, though. Cas, you and I are okay. We’ve always been okay and we’re always gonna be okay. Don’t you dare forget that. And please, Cas, for the love of all that is holy, don’t give up on me.”

Cas is sure he looks positively awful, his face covered in snot and tears, but he laughs in relief and kisses his husband anyway, and for yet another perfect moment to place into the scrapbook of his life, everything is perfect.


End file.
